Liquid personal cleansing products are becoming more popular in the United States and around the world. Desirable liquid personal cleansing compositions must meet a number of criteria. For example, in order to be acceptable to consumers, a liquid personal cleansing product must exhibit good cleaning properties, must exhibit good lathering characteristics, must be mild to the skin (not cause drying or irritation) and preferably should even provide a moisturization benefit to the skin.
Liquid personal cleansing products which contain high levels of lipophilic skin conditioning agents have been disclosed. In fact, consumer products, such as Olay Moisturizing Body Wash, which, especially when used with the Olay Cleansing Puff, deposit lipophilic skin conditioning agents on the skin are enormously popular with consumers. Nevertheless, some consumers would prefer to have an even greater moisturizing benefit delivered from these liquid personal cleansing products. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a liquid personal cleansing composition with even greater moisturizing properties.
It has now been found that the deposition of a lipophilic skin moisturizing agent on the skin can be dramatically increased if the lipophilic skin moisturizing agent comprises relatively large oil droplets. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to formulate a personal cleansing composition which contains this type of lipophilic skin moisturizing agent because the large oil droplets tend to be destroyed (broken down into smaller particles) during the processing, especially the packaging, of the liquid compositions. It has now also been found, however, that the integrity of the relatively large particles comprising the lipophilic skin moisturizing agent can be preserved by encapsulating the moisturizing agent within a complex coascervate. The complex coascervate must be of a nature such that it protects the integrity of the large particles during processing, but still allows the lipophilic skin moisturizing agent contained therein to deposit on the skin.